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"The words of magic, O my brothers: Tits.
Boobs. Teats. Bazooms. Thingumbobs.
Knockers. Headlights. Grapefruits. Cantaloupes.
A pair that stick out like Mussolini's balcony. A
pair that would make a bishop kick a hole in a
stained-glass window." That's the way this book
begins and that is what it is all about-breasts.
It's a pervasive subject. In his masterful
blend of history and humor, erudition and
erotica, author Robert A. Wilson writes, "There
is no art, no poetry, no song, no human expression in which the female breast is not celebrated
and adored. Its forms appear disguised but
,rrr.ri-niable in architecture, in pottery, in the
design;rf cathedrals and temples, in mystic
..rmlols 1i,'<e the Chinese yin andyan6f and the
i.rroo"".r Rc'sY Cross." With text and photogrrph., The Boo-'! oI the Bteast traces man's
never-ending breast-.Quest through all these
areas, uncovering 5ems .fascinating facts along
the way. Such as the ancifnt gold cup that, legend
has it, was molded directly f1,om a breast of
Helen of Troy.
There are many heroines of ti'' female
figure, from Eleanor of Aquitaine, who ' "'e
bare-breasted through the streets of medie"al
wer'
Jerusalem, to Jane Russell, whose breasts
The
Outlaw
said to have hung over the movie
like thunderclouds. There are even antiheroines, such as Theda Bara (her name an
anagram on Death Arab ), the sex goddess of the
1920s, when women developed mammaloContinued on back flaP
Continued from front flap
phobia and figuratively gave their breasts away.
Why are we so obsessed, even worshipful,
of breasts? The reasons have little to do with
fashions or fads. They are essentially biological,
evolutionary. Look around you and count the
number of people you see smoking, or chewing
gum, or biting their fingernails, or eating too
many potato chips, or gnawing the edge of their
mustaches. We are oral creatures, always in
search of a breast. Our world view is formed in
large part during those first seven months of our
liv; es when we are being nursed by breasts or
breast substitutes.
But it isn't just the milk that attracts us.
It's our sexual nature. In fact, the human breast
evolved to its present size-proportionally large
compared to other mammalsn-more to suit the
needs of adult sexuality than infant feeding.
Combine the instinctive drives of hunger
and sex, focus them on two catenary curves that
promise fulfillment, and you have a force
powerful enough to shape civilizations, inspire
artists and poets, and give visual, tactile and
emotional pleasure to each individual male.
A word about the photographs: Some peowill tell you that they are sinful or sexist. Pay
them no heed. They are a dying breed,like the
duckbilled platypus, and you will outlive them.
ple
Robert A. Wilson is a former associate
editor of pr-aysoy magazine. His writings have
appeared in over 2OO magazines and newspapers. He contributed to the Encyclopedia oI
Sexual Behavior and is the author of Playboy's
BookoI ForbiddenWords and Sex and Dru$s:
A J ourney Beyond Limits.
Jacket photos by: The Art Institute of Chicago (top
left); The Penguin Collection (bottom left); Wide
World (center); Scala, New York/Florence (top
right); Abner Symons (bottom right).
Cover Designed by The New Studio, Inc.
PLAYBOY PRESS
Distributed by
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
New York, New York
16804
rsBN 87223-38+7
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A Pla1'lnv I'rcss l]cxrk
Acl;tt ou:Iedg m.ent
Table o.l' Putrist ancl Mutrist CuLtures by G.
Rattray Taylor reprinted from SEX IN HISTORY by G. Rattra-v Taylor by permission of the
publisher', The Vangu2l'd Press, Inc. Cop.1,"right
, 1970, 1954 by G. Rattray Ta.-,'lor. Originally
published in England by Thanes and Hudson,
Ltd. in
1953.
Cop5'r'ight , 1974 by Robert Anton \Vilson. All rights rescrvetl. No part of this book n.ray be reproducecl, stoled in a
retrier.al s1'sten or transnittetl in any foln-r by zrn electronic, mechanical, photocopf ing, recording lneans ol otherr'",ise,
rvithout priol rvritten pelmission of the zruthor.
Published simultzrneousll in the United States ancl Canada
bv Plavbov Press, Chicago, Iilinois. Plinteti in the Uniterd
State's of Amcrictr. Librarl' of Congress (latalog (':rld Nunr-
ber:
7iJ-8.1919.
ISRN
8722i:i-:18-1-7.
I,'ii st crlition.
PLAYBOY and Rabbit Head design are trademarks of Play-
6
boy, 919 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611
(U.S.A.), Reg. U.S. Pat. Off., marca registrada, t,ial"que
cl6nos6e.
891011
to thc \\'()nlcll o1-lllirrrct citrllt
this sturh'o1'unitv in rhralitr-
"To the littie boy in ure, I am a God, you are a Goddess.
To the little gill in yriu, you are a Goddess, I am a God.
To the God in nre, I arm a little boy, to the Goddess in you.
To tl-re Goddess in -von, you ale a little giri, to the God in me."
- i.;! zi,;,!,t"o',',Y,oc,
o
",
nn
contcnts
Introduction
11
77
Chapter 1 It Began with Erection
Chapter 2 Tales of the Vienna Woods 47
Chapter 3 The Breast Repressed
59
Chapter 4 Mammary Metaphysics
83
Chapter 5 The Return of the Repressed 115
Chapter 6 The Breast Expressed and
the Breast Possessed
133
Chapter 7 Making a Clean Breast of It 167
introdtrction
The history of civilization is the histoly of a long
warfare between the dangelous and porverful forces
of the id, and the various systerns of taboos and
inhibitions which man has erected to control
them. . . .
Rattray Taylor
-G.
The words of magic, O my brothers: Tits. Boobs. Teats.
Bazoonts. Thingumbobs. Knockers. Heacllights. Grapefruits.
Cantaloupes. A pair that stick out like Mussolini's balcony. A
pair that woultl make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass
windorn'. Breasts that you could hang your hat on. Yea, verilv,
two globes that haunt us "like the ts'in moolls of Mars"
(William Lindsay Gresham). "The latest tit lottery" (journalists' slang for a beauty contest). Even the inimortal bard
himself, seeking to break out of conventional poetic language,
does so by attacking the best knou'n of all cliches: snow-rvhite
breasts. "If snow be u'hite," he comments skeptically, "why
then her breasts are dun." Joyce ends his monumental psychological novel ULysses with Molly Bloom's rapturous memolies:
Arid then he asked me would I 1'es to say yes my mountain
flower and first I put my arlrs at'ound him yes and drew him
dorvn to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
he:rrt rvas going like mad yes and y'es I said yes I will Yes.
There is no art, no poetry, no song, no human expression, in
which the female breast is not celebrated and adoled. Its
folms appear clisguised but undetriable in arcl"iitecture, in
pottery, in the design of cathedrals and temples, in mystic
11
synrbols like the Chinese yin and'yang and the European Rosl'
Cross. If there is beauty, meaning and consolation in the
universe-as all art and rvorship seem to hint constantll'-a
lar.qe part of it is found in these strangely haunting curves.
Some of the best mathematicians have been especially pleoccupied r.vith the form r.r'hich is called a double tatenury and
which mal' have unconsciously inspired the engineers who
first solved the ploblems of suspension bridges.
Erza Pound, the most elusive, inteilectual and politically
engaged of modern poets, finallv gets back to basics neal the
end of his 900-page, 4O-year-in-r.vliting epic, 120 Cuntcss:
Horv to govern is flom Kuan Tzc
but the cup of u'hite gold in Peterzr
Helen's breasts gave that
Pour-rd refers to the old legend that a certain gold cup in
possession of the royal family of Petera orved its perfection of
shape to the fact that it rvas rloldecl directlv from one of the
breasts of Helen of Troy. Ho.,v to govern may be important,
Pound is telling us, but appreciating such beauty as Helen's
breasts is even more important. Onl,v a man who was r1 poet as
u'ell as a poiitical punclit could possibly have made such a
statenrent-u'hich mzly sr.lggest that rve rvould all be safer if
12
there were more poets and fe',ver political pundits.
Most rnen, after all, are on theil best behavior when under
the spell of that double catenary curve; they stare or feed or
caress and ale as cozy as puppies-one cannot imagine them er
threat to the earth, the animals or other men. But once they
leave this central sacrantent of existence and begin thinking
about how the univet'se (or other people) rnight be improvecl,
they are apt to go a bit wild and start brandishing clubs or
cannons or hydrogen bonrbs. Nobody knows rvhy the rest ofus
put them in government mansions instead of tnental hospitals
when they get stirred up that way, but they would certainly be
bettel off contenrplating Helen's breasts (or Sophia's or
Marge's or Jayne's or Molly's). Earth u'ould not resernble hell
quite so much if men attended to such earthly mattels nrore
and v,'ere not up in the air ovel icleologies.
Aldous Huxley wl'ote a book urging, among other things,
that there was great benefit to be obtained from intelligent
use of the psychedelic "magic mushroom" of Mexico (Psilocllbe
'trLexicanu). One Marxist critic commented sourly that the
novelist's message seemed to be, have fun with fungi. Huxley
replied sharply that having fun with fungi was better than
having idiocy with ideology. I would suggest that it is better
still to have fits over tits, be crackers over knockers, be bonkers over boobs or just act unrepressed with a lovely breast.
Surely-as the pictures in this book will eventually tell you,
if you look at them long enough-this must be a mad world
governed by psychopaths and infested by neurotics, for many,
many people will tell you that these lovely reproductions are
"obscene" or "sexist" or even "sinful." Such people are a
vanishing species, Iike the duckbilled platypus, but like all
fossils they have crept into pulpits and governmental broom
closets to die. They would have you believe that it would be
more elevating for your character were you to peruse a book of
news photographs showing the atrocities idealists have recently committed in their efforts to correct the universe.
No. Do not be deceived by such voices, whether they proceed
from people actually invading your space-time right now or
whether they are old tapes still playing in the back of your
brain, repeating the imbecilities you heard in childhood. Beware of these false prophets-their hearts are the hearts of
bats, though their faces be the faces of men. Nietzsche had the
right word for them: troglodytes, cave-dwellers.
The sane and sound man, the man of mens sana in corpore
sano, is not deceived by such leather-winged, beetle-eyed,
bug-brained, cobweb-nosed, cold-hearted and muddy-intellected saprophytes, whether they march under the reactionary banner of old-time religion or the revolutionary flags of
Marxian neo-feminism. They are carriers of what psychiatrist
Wilhelm Reich called "the emotional plague," the spirit that
denies light, the spirit that stifles life. They dwell in the
shadows and in dark, clammy places, and there is no health in
them.
The most cultivated of the Medicis, Lovenzo the Magnificent
(1449-1492)-banker, patron of the arts, poet, scholar-has
wlitten, in his Tt'iumph o.'f' Bucchus und AriutLtte, the sanest
of ail Renaissance testarnents:
Lasses and ye youthful lovers,
Long live Wine and long live Love!
Let each make music, dance and sing,
Let every healt enflame rn'ith pleasurel
Not with duty, not with grief!
All who live, rejoice ye greatly
1'
And be happ-v, 1'e who riiay!
What's to conrer is still unknorvn!
Hor'v f:ril is youth that flies so fastl
An anonvr-r1ous Greek. 1200 1.ears earlier, pr.rt the same
message in slightly diffei'ent and even llrore nremorable words
on his very tombstone to instruct the future in bold u'isdom:
Nothing to clutch in lil'e
Nothing to fear in cleath
1.1
There is no wa1' of arguing against this ancient Mediterranean sar-rity, any mole than you can argue with :rn April
breeze. Those who feel it are immediately bucked up, and all
youl words of gloom and sin will not bring them dorvn again.
As the Egyptian Pharaoh Khati said, 2000 years earlier th:rn
even the anonymous Greek tombstone, "A man's heaven is his
own good spirits."
So "be happy ye u'ho rray." Don't let them tell you that rn'hat
you feel looking at these lovely pictures is "male chauvinism"
or "sin" or'"prurient intelest." God help us; like an Aplil wind,
like the sunrise itself, like a puppy runnin.q through the
shrubs, like the tenacious grass pushing up into sunlight from
the rnost unpromising glound and even through cracks in
concrete, there is one signatule in all things. The force that
ma<le men out of apes is the force that rtrakes a man stare at a
nipple ancl rnakes the nipple hartlen proudly under his gaze.
\Vhitman sang of "the body electric" and irippies taik er-rdlessly of the "vibes" in one situation and another'. Freud
insisted that beneath the conscious elfo we are driven ancl
navigated by a lnw, erotic life-folce u'hich he called the libitlo.
The secret Rosicrucian and Illuminati brotherhoods of the
Ren:rissance explained all life as the manifestation of an
astrai enelgy u'irich could be found in the sexual union by
those who kept their consciousness unclouded. Mesmer, in the
1Stli Century, rediscovelc'd it and cailed it animal magnetism.
Balon Reichenb:rch four-rd it again in the 19th Centulv an(l
called it od. Wilhelm Reich, in the 1930s, showed that it could
be measured on an oscilloscope attached to a man and woman
in the genital embrace and norl'tlie Russian pal'airsychologists
har.'e photographed it and demotrstrated that it accumulates itr
pyramid-shaped structures. Freud was lnore profound than he
realizecl, ',r'hen he said that the pvramitls were an unconsciou.s
tribute to the female breasts.
Filt rttt T: Trro ttttettrrttl (ntres.l()t'tn tltr ltttttisplrLrt,s o.l
St'hoen. Tlir tr srvoi'lrl Fc:rt ule S v ndic ate.
tnttir bcrrrrlv. I):rvirl
f,
,t,
8.
I
This force-called tao and prana and kundalini in the Orient, ntano, by the Polynesians, {trendct by the Iroquois, tttako,n
by the Plains Indians-is hailed as Light and Life and Joy by
the poets of all languages. It is the only rebuttal anywltere to
the logic of despuir. On the level of verbal argument the cynics
always win, have always won, and especially since Hiroshima
must always win. The only answer to them that carries
conviction is the spontaneous and unpremeditated surge of
life when, always unexpectedly, Beauty and .Ioy manifest
themselves and you know why you are here and what you
must do. This illumination is always intimate, always setrsual
and almost invariably sexual, either in the specific sense or in
a more general wzry. No other power can withstand the paranoiac pragmatism that constantly reminds us that we must
die, that'all we build must crumble, that there is no point in
anything. The erotic life-energy that takes two catenary
curves and turns them into the supremely beautiful and
desirable is the answer, and the whole answer, to such gloomy
grousing. It tells us why we go on and will go on.
Those two hemispheres are, after all, the best things in the
world (see Figure 1).
It)
itbcear^
with Ercction
I would have driven right by, if
a beautiful pair of boobs.
-Haroid
she hadn't had such
Lord Randomfactor
This hang-up that we've all got, this obsession about the
breasts, this fetish, this fanaticism, this strange compulsion,
this (let us be frank, for God's sake-the hour is late and
nuclear doom pounds on the door: Why try to hide any longer?)
worship and adoro,tion, Lb,en-it's evolutionary, Ti-Grace, the
force of nature itself, Steinhem, pure biology, Robin. A mammal, for heaven's sake, is an animal species in which the
female gives birth to living young-instead of just laying eggs
like the birds in the air or the fish in the sea or the reptiles in
Pogo's mucky old swamp-and then su,ckLes them. I didn't do it.
Hugh Hefner and Howard Hughes and even Moses didn't do it:
Some cail it evolution
And others call it God
that's who did it. Sixty
-and
million years ago, it started-a marvelously intricate
million years ago, a hundred
bio-
chemical process in which the governor (evolution, god, goddess, the DNA spiral) began to transtnute and mutate blood
1'
into milk and drive it, as Dylan said, with "tl're force that
through the green shoot drives the flower" out of furrv little
creatures (insignificant comparecl to the tyrannosaurus, that
walking nightrnare, ol the hundi'ed-ton brontosaurus, or their
kin) into the mouths of their offspling. That was it: It rvas a
milk.factory, flattish and unformed at first, just as it still is in
1E
evely species except one. Yes, we are nalllmals. Our ancestols
wel'e mammals. None of us arrived here in the latest mod
styles or u'ith the correct ideology and the glossiest up-to-theminute sense of clecorum ancl facl. No, no, not at all, baby: We
emerged naked from a mammal's womb and were quickly
clapped to a manrmal's teat or eise given a bottle spikecl with
sonrebody's notion of the colrect chemicals based on something that was still the milk of anothel mammal-a distant
cousin who says "rnoo" ancl chelvs grass. This is our home
planet, dig; we grew here and our relatives are all over the
place mooing and barking and braying and chattering in the
trees. We did not drop from some plasticized, computerized,
hygienic, kublickized, antiseptic, progressive nursery in the
Andromeda Galarv. We are of the earth, earth-v.
The governor intended us to be sucl<letl; and suckled, by god,
thlough most of our history rve have beelr. Is this unimportant
in consitlering our basic ps-vchology? Groli: If r.ou $'atch people
notice a peculiar and signilicant fact-thev
cat'eful11', 1'ou
engaged in sucliing activities or r,erI' close
:rr'e flequently"vill
substitr.rtes. (Wzrit: We will see later r',.h}' Eleanol of Aquitaine
rorle bare-breasted throuEh the stleets Jesus once rvalked.
Holcl on.) Despite the cancerr ten'or' \vage(l b1' the sLilgeoll
general's office, for instance, there are still around 85,000,000
of us in Arnelica sucking on cigzu'ettes ever-v da1.. Others cherv
gurn (spealmint, juicy fluit, can<l\r-coated ol sugar-free, tzrke
yolrr pick), bite theil fingerntrils, gnaw their hnuckles, scrunch
pencil stubs, eat a hell of a lot urore than the-v neeci. (Potato
chips, anyone? tr N'Ials bat', maybe? pretzels, peanuts. cashervs,
do -vou r.vant the cheese and crackers r'vith vour beer, mac? ancl
clo try sonle nlore of the c:rnapes, l'Irs. l{iller'.) Sonre cheu'their'
lips, gobble trzrnks ol uppers, tnunch their ou'n mnstaches,lrea,
velily, even liiss the plastel feet of hol,l' itnages-and u'hen
thel' get to the bedloonil Yes, brethrern: N{an be.q'ins as a
depenclent animal rvho needs to be fetl fol a mininum of seven
rnonths (often longer') befole being able to fee<l himself. Dur'ing these months a whole pet'sonalit;"' and a vierv of the world
is being formed; that world-view is quite har'd to change later
because it is nonverbal, prelogical and probably contains large
elenrents of intpt'irttitt11.
Imprinting is ethological language for a very special kind of
conditioning. Normallv, conclitioning can be removed b1, counterconditioning-a dog u'ho learns to salivate at a bell can be
retrained to bark at the bell and salivate at a horn instead.
Hotnosexuals-who are, ethologicaliy considered, men who
have been conditioned to become sexually aroused b1' other
r-nen; nothing more remarkable or sinister than that-have
been counterconditioned, in a fe'uv notable cases, and suddenly
get turned on b5. women, just like you and me. Such is
contlitioning, anrl if you study the emotional rush people feel
at the sight of their nation's flag, and lemerlber hor,v they
were trained to have that reaction, you prett-v well understand
conditioning.
Imprinting, on the othel hand, czrnnot be removed by any
amount of counterconditioning. It occurs or-ily in the first
stages of infancl', and once a reflex has been in-rprinted it stay's
for life. There is an anaiogy here with thermoplastic and
thermosetting chemical compounds. Thermciplastic compounds can all be reversed and modified, like oldinarl' conditioning. Thermosetting compounds keep their shape under all
conditions until they are chenically destloyed, just as imprinting remains unchanged until the organism coagulatesi.e., dies. It's nobody's fault that some natural processes al'e
irreversible. That's just the rvay the u'orld is.r
How important is such imprinting? Well, Konrad Lorenz, one
of the most important researchers in this field, has quoted
some astonishing cases. Adult gantlers, for instance, do not
becorne sexually erttracted to geese unless thev have been
imprinted with the "program" of goose-as-object-of-affection
by nestling rvith theil mothers as newboln goslings. Lacking
this maternal programming, the ganders may remain lifelong
bachelors or even become homoserual. More: Lot'enz tells of a
case rvhele, due to his or,vn obsessive and protective care of
these experimental birds, one gosling got imprinted tvith /ris
tTirnothv Lealy, I'h. l).. :rntl :r feu. othel psychedelic hct'etics havc cl:rimetl that il)rprjnting can be lerroverl if the counterconditioning is given u.hile the subiect is on zrn l,SI) tlip.
This has not been conlirnred, since the governrnent h:rs preventcd fulthel lcsealch in this
fieltl sincc
1967.
1t)
20
image as the adoi'able maternzrl object. In adr-rlt life, this very
pelplexed ganrler follor,ved Dr. Lot'enz about like a tlue lover
in an olcl ball:rd, constantll tnaking sexuztl aclvartces, totaliy
uninterested ilr the plr.rmp and niore appropriate geese all
around him. Strangerstili, due tct a series of accidents, one
garrdei' got imprinted rvith a ping-pottg bull as the love object
anrl spent his life in frustrating attempts to m<iunt these little
plastic spheres.
This ma1' not be the rvhole explanation of hnman "fetishists," those rare types who get their jollies from $'omen's
clotliing rather than fronr \vornen, ol' from feet or hait' or
leather garments, etc. It is an interesting parallel, however,
and it shows that "overestitrration of the sexuai object"
(Freud's nicely cynical description of sexutrl love, or romanticism) is built on a firm foundation in biology. When ganders
are pr'ogr'zrr.nmed properll' by theil rnothers, they fall in love
just like humans and form pair-bonds (the prehuman origin of
rvhat rve call man'iages) that usually last for'life. It must be
admitted that they .qo into the rvoods for a little adultery now
ancl then; Lorenz tells us of a research associate, thrilled by
the discover'-v of "nronogaml"' in these birds, rvho rvas subsequently disillusioned to learn of their "infidelities." Another
member of the staff then excused them philosophically rvith
thc observation: "After all, they'r'e only human."
So: If vou want to understand people, begin u'ith thtrt seven
months of helpless clependenc.n" in which all foocl (ancl much
emotional gratification, security, love, etc.) comes in onllt
thlough that pair of nippiecl globes callerl the matrrmat'ies, or a
close substitute. In-ragine the conditioning that is obvior.rsly
occurring, and the irreversible imprinting that is probably
also occun'ing. Norv do lr6lr know rvhy you bor.ight this book?
For the same biological reason the Romans envisioned the
gleat Mother Godcless Diana of Ephesus, rvith literally tiozens
of enormous breasts (enough for everybody?) and St. Paul
reports hearing people at church chanting t'apturously:
"Great is Diana." Great indeed! The satle sort of fantasy,
somewhat deflected by Christian wotnan-hate, appears in conterlporary folk expressions about the delights of "running
barefoot across an acre of tits" or, more cozily, "cliving headfir'st into a balrel of tits."
It can safely be said that hurnan psychologl. would be
entirelv different-radically clifferent-if tits had never ap-
peared in evolution. We rvill give repeated examples of this as
we proceed. Fol the time being, just consider the warmest
kinds of love you have experienced with other humans, sexually or platonically, r.vith women or with men who have been
friends or helpers to you. Do you think we lvould have any of
that sort of emotion without the conditioning received at the
breast? Take a look at hor'r' iguanas or othel' reptiles (who are
not suckled) relate to each other, and make a guess about how
many of the "cold, snaky bastards" you've met were either
bottle-fed or nursed by mothers lr''ho had negative feelings
about nursing. Wilhelm Reich said that traumas received
during nursing from mothers who are uptight about their
mammalian functions are "the source of the human ne"-fls
dawn of the feeling that there's something \\'rong with the
universe and it has to be fixed as bloodily and quickly as
possible.
We don't know lvhat sort of nursing experiences
little Adolf
Schicklgruber had, but bv the time he was going to school
Hitler already had a strong dislike of girls and grew angry
whenever thel' tried to kiss him. Ninety-r-nillion people died in
the course of his attempt to correct the univelse.
Women's liberationists often seem to think that the breast is
rather atavistic and should go the way of the tonsils and the
vermiform appendix to the dustbin of evolution. Whether they
are right or not-and the author of this book can be expected
to consider them wrong-the vast changes many of these
ladies expect in human society probably cannot be accomplished without some such demammalization. As long as little
boys (and little girls) are nursed at the breast, certain conditioned expectations about womanhood will be re-created every
generation. These expectations, of course, do not need to
coexist with systematic economic exploitation of rvomen and
can easily accommodate much more equality than is now
practiced, but they sharply conflict with any attempt to create
the sexless, anthill socialism the extreme liberationists want.
Actually, there is reason to believe that the distinctly
human breast is a response to adult sexuality rather than to
the needs of the newborn. That is, the large size of the human
female breast is not an evolutionary ans\\'er to demands made
by infants as infants but rather to the needs of these infants
after they were imprinted and grew up to incorporate the
breast quest into their adult sexuality. This is the opinion
21
of zoologist Desmond Morris in his bestseller', The l,{aked
Ape.
22
The characteristic breasts of the hunran female, Mon'is
believes, are a result of standing erect. The other apes occasionally shamble about in a semierect position but usually go
on all fours-even the gorilla leans forward and trails his
fingers on the ground when upright and goes back to quadrupedal motion 'nvhen he's leally in a hurry. Hunran beings,
Morris points out, are also the only mammal species to copulate in a face-to-face position. This, it seems plausible to
suggest, is because of our habit of standing to face each other
during uerbcil intercourse-it seems "natural," or at least
desirable, to also face eacir other whiie lying down for sexual
intercourse. But the buttocks, rvhich play a large role in sexual
excitation with other apes, do not get much attention this way;
ergo, savs Molris, the human female has developed irn itation
bttttocks on her chest.
Like most nerv ideas in science, this sottnds absurd at first
sight-as if we were being tolci that the long nose has developed as an imitation penis. Well, evolution has many such
crude girnmicks (nature is a primitive artist), and it so happens
that we have a biological cousin rvhose nose tloes appear to be a
penis surrogate. This is the fauous "pnrple-assed" baboon, or
mandrill-the despised, evil-tempered species which plays a
distinctly negative role in African folklore. (This ugly beast
was even compared to the Chicago Police Department by Terry
Southern during the Democratic Convention of 1968.) While
ordinary zoo visitols remember chiefly the mandrill's spectacular rump, and Africans rvho have to live with his presence
talk much about his sullen bad temper, ethologists have long
wondered why his nose and cheeks are marked so as to
resemble his penis and testicles. It has finally been decided
that tlris is probably a se.i'r{aL signalitt.cl de"-ir:e, on a much
cruder and more direct level than the peacock's famous tail,
the male deer's antlers or the beards ol mustaches you and I
wear to notify women, "Hey, look, I'm male!" The mandrill,
true to his clumsy nature, has just found the most blatant way
of conveying thtrt ruessage. If others "\\,eal' theil hearts on
their sleeves," he wears his genitals on his face.
It is undeniable that the human female breast carries the
reverse inessage-"Hey, look, I'tn female!" Is Morris correct in
thinking that it ','"'as shaped bv evolution for the speciflc
purpose of carrying that signal? As Morris points out: "Other
species of primates provide an abundant milk supply for their
offspring and yet they fail to develop clearly defined hemispherical breast swellings. The female of our species is unique
among primates in this respect." If you look closely the next
time you're in the ape house at the zoo' you will see that
female primates do not have, and do not need, pendulous
human-style tits. Tlne tit-note the overtones and emotional
ambience of the word-is sexual, an outgrowth of the primordial teat, which was just nourishing. Morris even points out
that the young, both of our species and of other apes, find it
easier to nurse at small, flattish breasts. The bigbazoom is not
primarily for babies. It is for men.
Is it also, as Morris urges, a substitute buttock? This seems
scientifically plausible. A man standing erect (and perhaps
otherwise erect), moving toward a woman who wishes to be
mounted, is confronted by the rounded curves of her breasts in
much the same way that the other, quadrupedal, apes shambling toward a female of their species who is waiting to be
mounted see the similar rounded curves of the derriere.
Nevertheless, likely as all this sounds, it is only scientific
truth, laboratory truth, and one can't keep a straight face
while trying to contemplate it outside the laboratory' It is
definitely not advisable to think about it in the bedroom; you
might burst out laughing at the wrong time.
Imitation butt or not, the breasts certainly signal an unambiguously sexual message. When Howard Hughes produced
The Outlaw and introduced Jane Russell to the horny American public of the 1940s, he originally advertised it by having a
skywriting airplane inscribe in the heavens above Los Angeles
the following tasteful sales pitch:
THE OUTLAW
oo
Nobody had any trouble deciphering the symbolism. The
demand for the movie was so great that even though censorship problems postponed its American release for nearly a
decade, and we all had ample chance to inspect Miss Russell's
attributes in several other films during the interlude, The
Outlaw was still a box-office smash when the censors finally let
it out with only a few cuts. Although Miss Russell later
became something of a singer and dancer and even an actress
by the standards of those days, and further distinguished
,2
herself by joining a very primitive Fundamentalist church
and issuing such theological pronouncements as "God is a
living doll," she is still chiefly remembered for the fact that
from the side she somewhat resembled a filing cabinet with
fihe top drawer pulled all the way out (see Figure 2). Walter
Winchell, the popular columnist of the period, was calling
breasts "janerussells" in her honor for over a decade.
This is hardly unique. Ever since people became erect, and
even though there are still many happily atavistic "ass men"
among us, the front elevation of the female form (as an
architect would call it) dominates sexual art and fantasy, and
in that elevation the breasts are quite a bit more visible than
Figure 2: Jane Russell's breasts
ttere literally praised in the skies
by Howard Hughes, CourtesY of
the Penguin Collection
24
the vulva.
More: We are in the strange position of being the sexiest
animal on this planet, a fact long noted by Christian theologians who attribute it to Original Sin. In fact, as ethologists
have commented, it seems to be the result of our peculiar
weakness at birth and that all-important nursing period which
we have already stressed so much. The newborn human
cannot survive without a mother. But the human mother
could not cope with the hazards and creatures of the wild,
especially burdened with an infant, unless she persuaded a
male to hang around and help her. Ergo, some form of the
family was inevitable. It doesn't have to be the monogamous
Judeo-Christian family, of course; it may be polygynous, polyandrous, polygamous or the "group marriage" of sexual communism in the tribe or the hippie commune, but it will be a
family: A place where the young are tended until they can
tend themselves.
There are many forces that can and have held families
together, but the one that actually performs the lion's share of
the job throughout human evolution is sex. It is that simple.
Although other animals are less inhibited about sex-less
mental, less worried and less squeamish-it is a fallacy to
think that they are therefore sexier than we are. Anyone who
uses expressions like "barnyard morals" or "acting like an
animal" (to castigate a human being who seems to be enjoying
sex more than the speaker) is talking nonsense. A man with
"barnyard morals" or who "acted like an animal" would be
much less sexy than the average human.
The human being is the only animal without a limited
mating season: The only one who is ready, willing and able to
have sex all year long. This fact, together with our nakedness
or conspicuous lack of body fur-rvhich may also be sexual,
according to Desmond Morris-distinguislles us ft'om all other
mammals and our closest relatives in the primate familv.
Somehow, somewhere in evolution, the human or protohuman female mutated and leaped out of the estrus cycle of
other apes. She \r'as, so to speak, in heat all year long. And this
persuaded the human male to remain with her all year long
instead of just visiting at mating time, and formed the foundation of human society-the primordial family.
This constant sexiness or randiness may be the Original Sin,
as Fundamentalists think, but we would not be human without it. We probably shecl our fur to make our naked bodies
more conspicuous; we developed a year-long rutting season;
we huddled together into families (monogamous or otherwise)
and we became sonrething entirely new in nature. Without this
great leap forward into sempiternal horniness we would have
remained like the other beasts.
And the sexual signaling system on the female front elevation became the center of our thoughts and feelings.
It could hardly be otherwise. Going around on all fours,
using the normal mammalian position for copulation ("doggie
fashion," it is called by city dwellers), our ape cousins do not
get breasts involved in their sexuality. Oul direct ancestors, as
soon as they stood up, began to notice the territory between
the head and the vagina, and-since love and sex were easily
mergecl before Christianity arose to drive a wedge between
them-this brought back cozy rnemories of infancy. Women
were scarcely passive about this, of course, since the breast is
a center of very strong sexual feelings, as indicated in the
celebrated limerick:
There was a young girl from Dumfries
Who said to her beau, "If you please,
It would give nre great bliss
If while playing with this
You would pay some attention to thesel"
On this foundation grer.l' the entire structure of oral sexuality, to the great delight of millions throughout history and the
perpetual scandal of the clergy. We cannot re-create the
mental processes of the Dawn Woman who first decided to give
hel mate a blow job, but it may well have been inspired by his
own oral gratification of her nipples; some oral-genital sex, of
9q
!6
coul'se, appears in all animals anyway. Whoever she was and
whatever her thought, she did more for human happiness than
all the politicians and revolutionaries of history.
Oral sex, indeed, rvould be an extremely unlikelv invention
lvithout the suckling experience of infancy among ourselves,
our primate ancestors, and the mammals from whom we
sprung. The art has been carefully (almost remorselessly)
analyzed by Gershon Legman in his curious Orugenito,Lism: ArL
Encyclopedia of Techniques, which catalogs hundreds of variations (and demonstrates mathenratically that there are millions of other possibilities which the author hasn't bothered to
tabulate)-and yet all of these are within the three main
divisions of cunnilingus, fellatio and the 69 ot' soirante-neu-f.
Legman doesn't bother rn'ith the variations of breast oralism,
the "trip around the world," in which the whole body is licked
and sucked, or the peculiar Oriental delights of toe-nibbling
and finger-sucking. A real zrttempt to catalog all tlie sexual
uses of the human mouth would undoubtedly run into several
volumes; if it were exhaustive in its descriptions, it could
easily be heftier than a complete set of the EncycLopaedia
Britannica.
(For instance, although sexological writers in English generally use the one word fellatio for all varieties of cocksucking,
the Romans had two words for two great divisions, irrespective of position. Thus, in feLLatio proper, the man is entirely
passive and the woman actively and vigorously sucks, licks
and manually stimulates his penis; while in irrumation, the
woman remains passive and the man forcibly thrusts his penis
in and out of her mouth in the l.llanner of vaginal intercourse.
We are on the way to building an encyclopedia when we start
subdividing these into vertical fellatio, horizontal fellatio,
sitting fellatio, etc.)
Despite the deep-seated Christian aversion to orai sex (only
relaxed a bit in recent decades), Kinsey found the practice
widespread even during the sexual Dark Ages in which he '*'as
writing. It is hard to see horv a mammal rvith the typical
marnmalian breast-suckling experience could afterward be so
conditioned that oral sex would be abolished, no matter how
vehemently the clelgy might try. After all, as we have already
seen, breast-feeding occurs when the new organism is most
subject to im,printing, which no amount of later conditioning
can alter. Nevertheless, the practice was under such heavy
taboo in America before World War I that our soldiers in
France were absolutely astonished at the Gallic enthusiasm
for such clelights-which is the inspiration for one of the
best-known stanzas in lllademoiselle from Armentieres:
The French, they are a funny race, parlez-vous,
The French, they are a funny race, parlez-vous,
The French, they are a funnv race,
The fight rvith their feet and fuck '"1'ith their face
Hinky-din ky-parlez-vous !
("They fight with their feet" refers to the popular French
sport in which two males try to knock each other out using feet
instead of fists. Experts at this art have been known to defeat
professional boxers; they can kick as high, and as fast, as anv
Nijinsky, and quite a bit harder.)
Today, of course, we are witnessing the amazing Linda
Lovelace cult. Ms. Loveiace (see Figure 3), who starred in a
porno flic called Deep Thronf, in which she portrayed a young
lady whose clitoris was in her throat and who, thelefore, could
only reach orgasm through vigorous fellatio, has become a sort
of heroine or fantasy figure to large segments of the population. One chap even wrote a letter to the San Fra,ncisco Ball
saying that he had seen Deeyt Throat 17 times and was hopelessly in love with Linda. Esquire placed her smiling and
winsome face on the cover of their June 1973 issue, but,
typically, inside they joked nervously about the origin of her
fame and couldn't bring themselves to sa1' bluntly that she
had performed the most esthetically exquisite cocksucking
ever shown in an American movie. There is even a group in
California, called the Erisian Liberation Front (ELF), which is
running Linda for president in 1976. Although they claim to be
dead serious about this, their slogan sounds like a satirical
comment on recent chief executives: "Let's Have a GoodLooking Cocksucker in the White House!"
Ms. Lovelace has even written (with the aid of a writer
named Douglas Warran) an autobiography called Inside Linda
Louelctce, in which she gives detailed instructions on how to
perform Deep Throaf fellatio ("I call it cocksucking," she says
with fetching frankness). The best posture for beginners,
Linda avers, is with the head hanging over the side of the bed
upside-down, giving the penis a straight line to the snug
warmth of the inner throat. Yoga exercises (muscle-stretching
and meditation), she adds, eventually give enough control and
27
\
E-
fl
'l
',"{,
*'r.-
Figure 3: Lind,a Louelace mnE
not haue uon such fame for her
throat had it not been for her
breasts. Photo by Josh Green.
30
relaxation to allow any woman to perform the Deep Throat
fellatio in any position without gagging-although it is unlikely that any will become proficient enough to challenge Linda's
calm brag: "I have become one of the supreme cocksuckers of
all time."
Linda's autobiography also describes a versatile assortment
of techniques for getting the most out of normal coitus,
anality, lesbianism and masturbation, all of which she claims
expertise at. Among other benefits ascribed to yoga is Linda's
claim that she can take a whole hutnctn .foot in her vagina; and
an existing porno film short shov's her doing just this. (Masters of Tantric yoga in India and Tibet are alleged to perform
even more remarkable feats, including continuing coitus for
seven hours at a stretch and sucking the semen back into the
penis after ejaculation.)
Whatever else this remarkable young woman has proven,
her career at least demonstrates that there exists a certain
force opposing the claims of the more rabid $'omen's liberationists with their papistlike proclamations that sex is always
oppressive and degrading to women. Linda very clearly represents the diametrically opposed viewpoint (occasionally enunciated by Ms. Virginia Johnson of Masters and Johnson) that a
truly free woman can enjoy sex not only as much as a male but
quite a bit more than a male. Perhaps she will become president after all.
Of course, orality has an evolutionary background. Practically all mammals practice some form of cunnilingus; that is,
the male licks the female's genitalia to prepare her fol intercourse. It never seems to go further than that, however-at
least no human scientist has reported seeing it go further. It
appears that mammals are incapable of the leap of thought (or
of energy) that allows that act to be contintted to orgasm and
then be folLotaed by intercourse. And a female mammal fellating a male mammal to orgasm is entirely unknown. This may
actually require the evolution of a human-style brain and
nervous system, and evolution may not yet be finished. There
are already reports in medical literature about rare and lucky
women who can achieve orgasm while onLy their breasts are
being sucked, and there have even been cases of women who
can achieve a climax while fellating their men. All this began
with the development of erect posture, the transcending of the
limited mating season, the use of the breasts for sexual
signaling, and the foundation of the family.
It is hard to realize that in a sense the universe has only
gradually been revealed to its inhabitants. There were long
stretches of tin,e in which no being with eyes had appearecl,
and yet everything alive was sensing and exploring its environment to the limits of its abilities. The recent research of
Backster and Vogel shows that plants and shrubs do much of
their exploring by means which, in humans, are called ESP or
telepathy. (Backster calls it primary perception.) These eyeless beings also sense their world through changes in light
(which can be felt) and by gravitational sense and temperature sense, among others. Out of this evolutionary background
appeared eyes and the visual space created by those eyes. So
marvelous was the new universe '*'hich the eyes beheld that
we find it very difficult to think of the structure of realit-v
without thinking of it as visual. From Maxwell and Einstein to
the present, modern science has baffied ordinary minds-as
well as those of some scientists-which cannot imagine or deal
with a reality that is not visual. Yet, on a cosmic scale, there
are likely to be countless races which perceive the realities
described in Maxwell's or Einstein's equations and who would
regard us as deluded primitives for thinking visual reality
is the "real" r'ealit;'. Perhaps such cosllric minds have already evolved here, sporadically ancl occasionally, and this
is what the great mentaL mystics like Buddha are trying to
tell us.
Similarly, sex has obviously evolved flom the simple seasonal program of the lower mammals to the year-round festivity
that it is among humans. Among humans there are signs of
slower and faster evolution also. (An old story tells of an
Irishman who bedded with a young French girl in Paris. Asked
how it was by another Irishman, he replied, "Sure, back in
County Westmeath sex is still in its infancy!") Kinsey, in the
1940s, founcl that the average American male completed copulation in less than two minutes; sexual gourmets who prolong
the act upward to an hour were astonished to read that. The
women who achieve orgasm through breast manipulation or
while fellating a man suggest powerfully that the evolution of
sex, as part of the evolution of mind perception, is also
continuing. So does the report of Baba Ram Dass (formerly Dr.
Richard Alpert) that he has continued sexual activity for
several hours while on LSD. Perhaps this is what the great
seructl mystics like Blake are trying to tell us.
It may even be that sexual mysticism of the Blake variety-
JI
also represented in Tantric Hinduism, Taoism, many primitive
religions, and by such historical figures as Jacques de Molay,
Bruno of Nola, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, Aleister
Crowley-represents the growing edge of human awareness,
the antennae of the species. (Linda Lovelace's yoga may be the
most aduanced yoga!) Desmond Morris tells of a woman who
could reach orgasm by having her earlobes sucked. Hieronymous Bosch in his paintings and Norman O. Brown in
those remarkable books, Life Against Death and Loue's BodE,
have suggested a possible evolution of sex out of the genitals
into every part of the body, just as it has already evolved from
being limited to one part of the year to permeating the entire
year. This seems to be the direction of evolution; and Christians of the year one million A.D.-if there are any-will find
humanity much more "fallen" and "sinful" than at present.
From a tiny rporadic acorn, sex seems to be a tree of life
growing to till all space-time utterly.
In this evolution, the breasts are already a first outpost of
the sexual energy escaping from the genitalia. They not only
Figure 4: The venus of Lllir- provoke sexual excitement in the male, they also receive
leid.orf is one of the oldest re- sexual pleasure for the female when they are handled or
lisious objects.in the world' Th" mouthed properly. (Similar outposts exist in the neck, earBettmann Archive.
lobes, behind the knee, etc.) The breasts represent the sexualization of a previously neutral area, and it is possible that they
have been worshiped for this.
And worshiped they have been, O my brothers. The caves of
our ancestors are frequently found decorated with sketches
very similar to Howard Hughes's skywriting advertisement
for The Outlaw; it is now fashionable, among some romantic
theorists, to suggest that these are flying saucers. An older
and more plausible theory says they are breasts. The most
famous of Stone Age artifacts, the Venus of Willendorf (see
Figure 4), unambiguously protrays a woman with enormous
mammaries. Similar big-breasted goddesses have been found
in caves throughout Europe and the Near East. When history
begins to emerge from the shadows, the earliest deities are
mother goddesses, who may be considered as psychological
extensions of the infant's memory of the breast: They are
all-giving, all-nourishing and totally bereft of the stern antilife ethics of the later father gods. Many of these deities, like
Diana of Ephesus mentioned earlier, were portrayed with
multitudinous breasts-an iconographic revelation of their
function.
When the great patriarchal religions of gloom and damnation swept over the world, hell was invented to frighten the
'wits out of little children and sex became diabolical instead of
divine. Men began to see the powers of nature not as gods and
goddesses but as dernons, and to suspect their wonren of being
witches; and the breast was put under seven and seventy
curses and exorcisms. Nevertheless, it crept back into the
design and architecture of the cathedrals-as every artist
knows-and eventually a new mother goddess was created and
allorved to enter the Christian pantheon as the \rirgin Mary.
It is important to lemember that biologicallv we have
scarcely changed at all in the past geological epoch. We still
prefer to eat in our own den, and lacking this we seek a
cavelike shape-which is why the wall booths in restaurants
are always filled before the central tables and why the lighting
is usually rlim. The man of the house, as he leaves in the
morning, says he is going "to bring home the bacon," although
he's probably headed for an office and not a boar hunt. When
'"r'e nrake love, we proceed from the human verbal level back
toward the primate tactile level, and the sound effects thereafter are not dissirrrilar to those of the great apes when
mating. When we go into the woods, we travel in bands-and it
has been observed that even in large sprawling metropolises
like New York or Tokyo the average person has aror-rnd 50 to
100 friends or at least aquaintances-the same number traditionally found in the tribal unit. Even our vaunted intelligence
about which we brag so much merely shows our predatory
history, for no nonpredatory animal has ever developed much
in the way of cunning or quick wits, u'hile our fellow predators
can give us a good challenge when on their own turf and can
even outsmart us on occasion. And we rernain stubbornly
territorial, just like our cousins the baboons and gorillas,
rvhich anybody can confirm by counting the "No Trespassing"
signs or safety locks in any human community.
It has been said that one can't understand sociology full.'g
without always keeping in mind that rnan originally made his
living by hunting in packs. Similarly, one cannot understand
sexology without remembering the humorous and serious side
effects of the fact that he is an animal whose female has
transferred important sexual centers from the low back vieu'
to the front top. From these facts flowed man's intellect, his
culture, his strange ways of organizing jobs and weddings, and
above all his warned sense of humor.
.).)
There are many versions of prehistory, but I prefer to think
it all began with erection. A female stood up to reach
2.1
some-
what higher on the tree for a special fruit. The male looked at
her and possibilities occured to him. We haven't stopped
thinking (about sex, and everything else) since then.
Of course, many people resent all reference to our animal
genealogy. They want to believe that all their ancestors were
perfect ladies and gentlemen. It is disturbing to these folks to
recall that in fact most of our ancestors didn't wear ties or
corsets-or, worse yet, that the overwhelming majority of
them weren't even mammals and looked like alligators or Gila
monsters. Yet this is the record, and you can still see the frog
in people when they swim a certain way or the lizard in them
when they are lolling in the sun.
There is also a notion afoot in certain quarters that we have,
although harnessed to this slummy and unaristocratic background, now evolved to the point where it is, or should be
irrelevant to us. One might as well tell the robin that a person
of his sartorial splendor should be above such grossness as
eating worms for dinner. The robin, glorious as he is, is still a
bird (and, if he has any sense, proud of it), and man, for all his
gaudy and flashy brilliance, is still a mammal (and, if he has
any sense, proud of it). Do you imagine it would be more
dignified to be an ostrich or a louse or a crab? Would it be less
disgraceful to have feathers like an angel (or a duck) than to
have the characteristic fur of a mammal? Would it be m<_rr.e
ethereal to synthesize energy directly from the sunlight, like a
dandelion, than to gnaw on bones like our second cousins the
dogs? F or that matter, does anybody hold it against his pet dog
that the creature was born alive from a bloody womb, suckled
at a teat, and scratches his coat like any other mammal? Then
why, in heaven's name, feel uncomfortable when the same
facts are mentioned about yourself?
It sometimes seems that we haven't yet come to gr.ips with
Freud, much less with Darwin. If somebody quotes Freud's
opinion that the pyramids (which are religious temples as well
as tombs) represent idealization or sublimation of the desire
for the breast, somebody else will invariably snicker and
remark that it just shows that the religious impulse is only a
deflection of sexuality. But what does the ,,only" mean? Is it
not an implication that religion should be manufactured of
some finer energy than that which drives infants and men to
grasp for breasts? Should it? What higher energy is there? We
say that "God is love," thinking we have transcended the
animal and material worlds with that resonant proclamation.
But is there one who has not first learned of love while holdinE
a breast between the hands or in the mouth?
We can laugh at the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus as a
crude conception of divinity, and yet perhaps the Romans
weye more sophisticated than us, not less. Christian theologians may proclaim from now till the last galoot's ashore that
their paintings of divinity as an old man sitting on a cloud are
not meant to be taken literally (was Diana taken literally by
Ovid), but they continue to speak of "He," thereby giving their
god a biological gender and therefore (since we do not speak of
plants or algae as he or she) a vertebrate natur.e. Can we
imagine this gaseous vertebrate (Thomas Henrl' Huxley's
phrase, and still an apt one) as truly nonhuman and nonmammal? Try it, and see if a rather fishy or reptilean image doesn't
fill up the blank as you push mammalian images aside. "God is
a symbol of God," said the subtle, modern theologian Paul
Tillich. It does seem that God the Father, like Diana the
mother, is just an image of something else-something we
cannot name but which we encounter in the family relationship and the sexual drive out of which that relationship grows.
(All gods come in families, even the allegedly monotheistic
Judeo-Christian God, Cabalistic Jews gave him a wife, Shekinah, and Christians, even more in keeping with Freud, gave
him a virgin who is both his wife and his mother.) This
something, this DNA spiral or governor or tao, made Sophia
Loren out of ancestresses who a short time ago looked like the
Venus of Willendorf and a while further back looked and
walked much like Cheetah the Chimpanzee. What it can still
make out of us staggered the imagination of Nietzsche and
inspired Kubrick to produce 2001.
Biology is much more mystical than theology, O my broth,
ers: For, dig, out of the simple animal tit, scarcely more than a
nipple, our friend the governor (or governess) sculpted these
round, cup-shaped, gloriously esthetic human breasts, each
consisting of 15 to 25 separate lobes which are almost whole
biological systems in themselves. Each lobe contains clusters
of lobules designed as intricately and functioning as smoothly
as the best modern machinery, all protected and made delightfully soft to the touch by large amounts of insulation in
the form of adipose (fatty) tissue. From each lobe there flows
in a great network like some master biocomputer the lactiferous ducts, running to meet in the nipple; and without
crowding or any traffic congestion, two more networks, of
blood and lyrnph vessels, are also packed into these cups,
providing nourishment and thermostatically regulating temperature. Best of all, the entire system has a neat feedback
loop-"the hot line," English biologist Alex Comfort nicely
calls it-running down to the genitals. This hot line is activated when a man sucks ol'caresses the breasts, creating sensations in the clitoris which make life worth living to the lady in
question and may even begin the process of vaginal lubrication preparatory to intercourse.
The same feedback loop, even more marvelously, goes into
action when an infant nurses at the breast, and the pleasant
vaginal sensations (which occasionally result in orgasm for
sorre nul'sing mothers) also begin the process of healing the
internal sex organs after the stretching and labor of childbirth. And all this operates on servomechanism principles,
without the executive officer (ego) having to pay any attention
at all. She can remain up on the bridge (i.e., in the frontal brain
lobes) concentrating on other matters, at least until some of
these processes become so pleasurable that she must turn
cartwheels or bail out entirely, swimming in the ocean of
bioenergetic bliss until the ship stops tossing about and she is
able to resume command again. Most marvelous of all, as R.
Buckminster Fuller points out in Nine Cltairts to the Moon,this
servomechanism, and all the others in the female body and
those in the male body too, and those in all our cousins
throughout the mammal kingdom, and our second and third
cousins in the fish and bird kingdoms, is not really a dead
machine (as this terminology makes it seem) but a living
presence, whom he dubs the "Phantom Captain." This is not
just an elaborate way of saying that living organisms are
liuing organisms; it rather sharply reminds us that the executive officer we usually recognize, the ego, scarcely deserves to
take so much credit when things go right-or so much blame
when things go wrong.
Why do we think of the phantom captain, then, as a father or
mother'? Anthropolgist Weston La Barre answel's:
do
An understanding of [re]igionl embraces also the explanation
of why religious response is uniquely hurnan. The content is the
u'n,i1"-ersallA human nucleat'family, the cotdition is indiuiduul
human neoteny [prolonged infancy]. . . . At the basis of every
religion is the familial experience and all religions consequently
contair-r sone basic oedipal story in their m-vths.2
This neoteny, of course, brings us to the area of Freud and
psychoanalysis, the subject of our next chapter. Before
plunging into the heated and almost fetid hothouse of controversy surroullding Freud and his works, it is well to remind
ourselves that whatever is true of modern infants was also
true 20,000 or 50,000 or even 500,000 years ago. If modern
infants have an "oceanic experience" of mystical oneness with
the universe while at the breast-and many psychiatrists not
dogmatically committed to Freudian theory continue to report
clinical evidence that they do-then this was also true among
our hairy ancestors crouching around campfir'es in the dawn of
history. If we continue to seek this experience in adult life,
then so did they.
But this conclusion leads to results that few of us have ever
thought about. According to David Cole Goldon's brilliant
study of masturbation, SeI.f-Loue, the search for adult "oceanic
experiences" includes such diverse behaviors as all forms of
sex, gambling, u,atching football games, certain kinds of
crinre, r'eligious rnysticism, mountain climbing and even sturl
poker. In each of these, the person seeks to plunge into an
ocean of sensation so intensely involving and pleasurable that
the usual barriel between Self and World is forgotten or
totally transcended. Obviously, many kinds of work-if selfchosen and deeply meaningful-also fall into the oceanic
category (one thinks of scientific research, literature, art,
music, etc.). So does every variety of play or game, and
especially contests in u'hich fear is deliberately faced and
transcended, such as auto racing or bullfighting. But once we
have traced the oceanic experience this far', it is hard to see
where we can draw the line at all, except at necessity itselfi.e., that which the universe forces us to do in order to survive.
Everything else-everything that is part of the fabric of
"culture" or human imagination rather than just given to us
by nature-seems to have this elernent of seeking blissful
transcendence. An Ernest Hemingway getting his oceanic
2Weston
La Balre, The Ghost Dunce: Origirts oJ Rttligion (Nerv York; Dell Publishing
Company, 1972).
QO
sensations by standing firm and firing his rifle at a charging
lion; a student transported and carried out of himself or
38
herself by the singing of "We Shall Not Be Moved" (and the
shared fear of the cops) at a protest demonstration; a compulsive bank-robber feeling his adrenaline jump as he walks into
a heavily guarded treasur.-g with no more than his own brains
and bravery to carry hirn through; the researcher in the
seventeenth hour of a test run, having lost all track of self,
time, food, friends and everything except the data being
recorded; little Portnoy ecstatically masturbating over his
sister's brassiere; the intrepid yogi who has held the same
as(Lna (posture) for ten hours while endlessly repeating the
mctntrcL "Hare Krishna"; the bridge-builder and bullfighter
we have
and the poet finding his rhyrre-all of them,
"r'hether
are, in a very
traditionally admired them or despised them,
profound biologicai sense, repeating or seeking to repeat a
state of consciousness first iearned at the breast.
And it is only because r:ren have been doing such rveird
things since the dawn of history that there is historl' at all;
otheru'ise v'e would be as changeless and stereotyped as all
the other mammals. The breast quest, in a thousand trillion
sublimated or generalized forms, is the essence of that restless
searching which makes us human.
Because, dig, man, when Mallory was asked why he had to
climb Everest and he gave his classic Zen answer, "Because
it's there," he was only telling part of the truth; and the other
part is rvell knorvn to all readers of Freud. And we can guess
why Aleister Crorvley, the poet who devoted so much of his life
to the attempt to replace the Father God Jehovah with the
ancient Egyptian Mother Goddess Nuit, was also a dedicated
mountain climber-the best in England in his day. The force
that sends men hurtling through the gravityless vacuum of
interplanetary space, risking the most truly cosnzic ten'ors in
all human history-do r,r'e need to ask rvhy, or' \'onder at the
entranced sound in their voices when they radio back to us and
speak of the "peace" and "beaut)"' they have found? The
moon-la luna-is female in almost all languages and identified rvith the mother goddess in almost all mythologies. The
great artists? We don't have to look at their nudes for evidence: Turn to the paintings without human figures in them
and study the logic of line itself-what form appears most
often? And what of the musicians? Well, vuhere did y6u hss.
music fir'st, who hummed or sang it to you, and against what
portion of her body were you being held? The architects break
away from the structural necessity of the engineering
straight line whenever they can to introduce a softening curve
which unconsciously reminds us of-tl.'hat? As for our eating
and drinking utensils, do they not attempt to remind us always
of our first nourishment? And the great Aristotle himself
recorded the significant debate about esthetics occuring in his
orvn day; to rvit:
The Pythagoreans are of the opinion that the shapes of the
Greek vases are reflections of the irrational numbers thought by
the Pure Mind. On the other hand, the Epicureans hold them to
be delived from the curves of a girl's breasts and thighs and
buttocks.
39
talcs of
tlrcvicnrrawoods
glisll' olcl 51'kos rvho have cl<ine oul
unsn.riiing bit on alices, rvherr thcv u.ei'e vung and
easilv fi'eudened
. . . but u,e
-Jo1.ce,
Fi tt tteourts \l'ul;e.
Accolding to folklore, two psychoanalysts met on the street
one morning. "Good day," said the fir'st politely. The other
nodded and walked on. A block latei'he stopped in his tr.acks
and said aloud, "Nou' I wonder what he was trf ing to hide?"
Yes, cousin, psychoanalysts do carry the tendency to seek
hidden meanings so far that thev often appear absurd to the
rest of us, simple and open souls that we are. First the
Freudians found symbolism in dreams-and we'll buv that. A
Iong tradition says these psychedelic night-visitors carry messages. Then they found meaning in slips of the tongue, and
everybody who remembers Richard Milhous Nixon saying
"This nation can't stand Pat" knows that even the most artful
dodger occasionally blurts out a home truth. (I once even
heard the brilliant Malcolm X stumble and reveal, then quickly conceal, the worst thing we have done to our black citizens,
saying, "And I hate every drop of bla- I mean, white blood in
my veins!")
41
/1t
The Freudians then went on to find hidden meanings in art
and literature, and most creative types will admit that their
inspiration comes up from a depth imperfectly understood:
Faulkner says his novels were dictated by "the Demon,"
Mailer speaks of "The Navigator in the Unconscious," Blake
thought the Archangel Gabriel was telling him what to write
and paint. Encouraged, the analysts went on to find similar
coded symbols in religion, rnythology, folklore, in science itself,
in all the products of the human imagination. Eventually,
Norman O. Brown was soberly writing that every sentence is a
symboiic coitus, the subject being male, tl-re object fernale and
the verb acting as penis. Somewhere along the line Freudianism had passed from science to theology and found itself the
proud possessor of a system that explains everlrthing.
A panchreston-an idea that expiains everything-is the
logical equivalent of a panacea-a tnedicine that cures everything-or of the perpetual-motion machine in physics. Sr.rch
ideals cannot possibly exist. We all know this intuitively, if we
have any common sense at all, and Russell and Whitehead,
with a strange passion for proving the obvious, have demonstrated it at length in their Principict ll[athematica. A human
formula which explains all human formulas is technically in
"the class of all classes which include themselves" and leads to
iogical contradictions. It is therefore invalid in logic and
mathematics. Good: We thus dispose of the more grandiose
Freudians, and get rid of Thomas Aquinas, Marx, Ayn Rand
and other absolutists for good measure. We are also free of
that damned barber who shaves every man who doesn't shave
himself, in the old riddle. (If he shaves himself, he violates the
definition, but if he doesn't shave himself he also violates the
definition. When we realize that he belongs to the logically
invalid "class of all classes that include themselves" we are
through with him forever.)
So: However hard the Freudians drive us, there is one
sanctuary to which we can flee. They literally cannot explain
everything. Somewhere there is a door they cannot force, a
temple they cannot enter', a iogically necessaly refuge which
their panchreston cannot incorporate, and there we can still
maintain our mysterious and dreadful freedom.
It has to be admitted though, that outside the last bastion
Freud and his satraps have explained a great deal-in fact,
more than most people cared to have had explained. A man
who is fastidiously neat, careful about balancing his budget,
eager to take an authoritarian role and give orders to others
ideal executive type in short-is probably an anal per-an
sonality. His whole psychic economy is involved with symbolic
substitutes for the struggles of will that went on in infancy
during toilet training. Bankers, accountants and mathematicians, as well as businessmen, are often of this type. An
uncomfortable thought? Then there's the compulsively chronically, monotonously promiscuous fellow-guess what? He's
probably a repressed homosexual. Each woman drives him
away quickly by her femininity; each new woman is grabbed
just as rapidly to stave off his unconscious desire for another
man. Does the shoe pinch yet? Then there's the gentle soul, the
liberal, the bleeding heart who cares for all people and suffers
every pain in the universe as if it were his own. He's an oral
personality, still symbolically nursing at the breast.
(Of course, nothing is quite as simple as these labels usould
lead one to belieue. Few of us are nothing more than one of
these Freudian categories, except in the literary or dramatic
arts where writers can simplify for dramatic effect. Purely
oral types-Chekhov's lJncle Vanya, Joyce's Leopold Bloom,
the timid little guys played by Danny Kaye, Harold Lloyd,
Wally Cox or Dennis Hopper-would probably not survive to
adulthood in the real world.)
Nevertheless, there are statistical clusters that remain
fairly consistent in psychological testing, and have repeatedly
been confirmed during several decades of such probing. Given
300 verbal statements to mark "I agree" or "l disagree,"
certain men will agree with most of the statements consistent
with an oral personality-that is, a personality largely determined by conditioning and imprinting received during the
nursing stage and therefore oriented chiefly toward a mother
archetype. Other men will agree with most of the statements
consistent with an anal personality-a personality largely
determined by conditioning and imprinting received during
toilet training or other early conflicts with social rules of
ttmoralitytt or ttdecorum.t'
For instance, the statement "I hate to see some smart
lawyer bedazzle a jury and get some no-good criminal off
scot-free"-which you must have seen on one of these personality quizzes at some time in your college or business
career-is always rejected by a purely oral type, who will
4.)
check "I disagree," and accepted by a purely anal type, who
rvill check "I agree." This is because the oral type identifies
with the underclog in every situation and assumes that the
defendant is accused wrongly or got into trouble through no
fault of his own. Anal types, on the other hand, have "introjected" the father archetype or authority principle, and are
always looking for sornebody to punish.:l
Interestingly enough, if you take the same group and give
them a nonverbal test such as the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), in which they look at pictures and n:rake up stories
about them, the oral types will devise oral stories, the anal
types rn,ill project anal stories, introverts and extraverts will
see characteristically introverted or extraverted situations,
etc., thereby illustrating the dictum of the first great psychologist, Buddha-that the u'orld we see is our orvn fantasy' For
instance, one statrdard picture shorvs a young man facing an
old lady who has a sad expression. To the oral type, they are
mother and son, he has done wrong, but she is about to forgive
him. To ar-r anal type, however, he. is more likely to be a bill
collector', she is trying to con him by crying, but he'll get the
moneyanyhow....
Before following these Freudian concepts any further, let us
stop to look at tr historical incident which seerns apropos.
Freckle-facecl Phryne, the most famous of the courtesans of
Athens in the 4th CenturY 8.c., was approximately contemporary with Pericles, Socrates, Alcibiades, Aristophanes and
Plato-a lively group of conversationalists, to say the Ieast of
them. They had other colorful traits, too: Alcibiades, one of the
best generals of his time, was probably the homosexual lover
of Socrates (who had a wife and a mistress on the side), and
was once disgraced and sent into exile for a drunken prank in
which he cut the penises off the statues of various gods in the
city. Phryne herself was not only lovely (they say she posed for
some of Praxiteles's voluptuous goddesses) but something of
an inclependent thinker herself , like rrrost of the rvell-educated
and artistically talented courtesan class. (Athenian wives, on
the other hand, were encouraged to remain both stupid and
submissive. Among its other glories and abominations, Athens
41
rlsee my notes on our. anal cuss-words ass, ass-hole,.s/iit and pig in Robert Anton Wilson,
Playboy's Bttok of Forbidden Wbrds (Nerv York: Playboy Press, 19?2)'
evidently pioneered what Women's Lib now calls male chauvinism.)
Phryne eventually got into serious trouble for her ideas and
was accused of impiety and disrespect for the gods. This was a
capital offense and Socrates later died for it. In Phryne's case
the court also seemed inclined to take a harsh view-just a
while before, they had sent Anaxagoras into exile for saying
that the way he figured it, the sun probably wasn't a god at all
but just a big hunk of burning rock. Seeing that things were
going against her, Phryne (or her lawyer; accounts differ)
pulled down her robe, exposed her fair bosom to the judges and
said this was her testimony. She was acquitted.
Cynics will say that the judges were horny old men. Esthetes
generally interpret the story as a noble illustration of the
religious awe that the Athenians had for beauty. Phryne had
said, in effect, does this vision not prove the gods are pleased
with me? Since the act of baring the breast was a traditional
sign of worship among the female devotees of the great
mother goddess, it is possible that Phryne was, indeed, testifying to her piety; see our discussions later of the breast
repressed and unrepressed. A very ingenious Freudian, however, might offer a more psychological interpretation.
Judges, according to Freudian theory, tend to be very anal
individuals, but being human they must have some oral component and a trace of tenderness and forgiveness. Phryne's
dramatic gesture, whether or not it reminded them of the rites
of the great goddess (at that point in decline, being replaced by
those of the father god, Zeus, but still practiced at least yearly
at the Eleusinian Mysteries), almost certainly startled them
into oral memories and associations. . . . It might almost be
considered an early example of Action or Gestalt therapy.
Similar partial or total nudity is used by the more radical
Encounter therapists to jar people back into awareness of
primordial realities underlying our cruel and complicated
social games of reward and punishment.
(See Dickens's astonishing use of the nude female breast as
a reminder of all we have lost in this cruel civilizalion, in the
passage from Dauid Copperfield to be quoted later. I also recall
Josef von Sternberg's Marked Woman, which has the most
painful climax in cinema history: Marlene Dietrich, about to
be shot by a firing squad, asks for a mirror and comb in order
to fix her hair before dying. These are provided, and she holds
the mirror to her face and raises the comb to her hair; the
gesture is so beautifully and delicately feminine that one
soldier bursts into tears, throws down his rifle and refuses to
shoot. He is led off in disgrace and a man better adjusted to our
civilization takes his place. She is shot-and the audience
comes out with the most ghastly silence you have ever heard
in a movie theater. Nobody looks at anybody else in the lobby.)
Returning to our oral and anal types: After we have identified them through the verbal tests and that TAT, some interesting things happen if we put them in a group therapy
session. The anal types will immediately try to dominate the
therapist, or, failing that, they will try to compete with him for
authority over the rest of the group. The oral types, on the
other hand, will quickly broadcast how helpless they are and
how much care they need. This is so commonplace that the
therapist, without seeing the previous test results at all and
without time for a real "depth analysis," will still classify
.16
them into these groups, precisely as the man marking the tests
has classified them. (This experiment has been tried repeatedly, with the results as predicted by Freudian theory. Timothy
Leary, Ph.D., of LSD fame, was one of the first to set up a
large-scale experiment of this sort. Curiously, his own testing
procedures were used on him a decade later when he entered
prison.)
But if this much of Freudian theory is true-if most people
will show the same tendencies in their verbal responses, their
visual imagination and their actual behavior in groups-we
had better look a bit more closely at the good doctor Freud's
ideas about breasts and oralism. At least, that might tell us
why this book turns us on (and why many of us feel secretly
guilty about being turned on by it).
The pleasure of the child at the breast, says Freud, is sexual
pleasure. The love of the child for its mother is sexual love.
This does not mean that the little boy wants to possess his
mother in the manner of adult sexuality or that the little girl
is necessarily a little lesbian. It means that the basic physical
and psychological bliss is, on an energetic and biological level,
the same that we later experience in adult sexuality. Two
Freudian revisionists, Wilhelm Reich, M.D., and Frederick
Perls, M.D., Ph.D., have clarified this somewhat by pointing
out that anriety is also the same energy running in the
opposite direction. Let us call it excitement, to be simple. When
excitenrent is tu'oused, when ener.g)' seeks an outlet in actioD,
one either goes forward to the goal (energy discharge) or one
blocks and ]resitates. In any discharge, the same energetic
processes ale occurring, and this is whzrt Freud means in
saying all pieasr-rre is sexual pleasure. If there is a block, the
sal-ne energy' annoyingly remains "on tap" :rs it were' and this
senszrtion is called anxiety. On the verbal level, this state is
explessecl b-v such phrases as "Oh, I don't know rvhat to
rlo-I'i.n afraitl-Eithet' choice seems equalil" bztci'" Freud callecl tl-ris BesetztQig. rvhich in German has the hotrtelv I'treaning
of sitting clown. Brill, Ft'eud's American tl'zrnslator', tulned
this into the nrole academic-looking t'rttftc.ris, which is a tu'odollar Lzrtin rvorcl that on etymological exatrrination turns out
to mean the same as sitting down. Reich cirlled it "emotional
anchoring," lvhich is mole poetic and sttggests a ship being
held back by a heavy weight while Perls, I'i'ith typical earthiness, just calls it beittg stuck.
Thus, there is nothing wrong with the infant's bliss at the
breast; it is entirely appropriate for that age. There is nothing
wl'ong with the pelsonality and behaviors he develops to enjoy
that stage to its r-tttlost. Burrittg entcttional sliocA's ot' othet'
enuironntetttuL o,ttcrtks ttrt hittt, he will grorv ezrsily and naturally into other stages, lieeping just as llluch of this love-sex
experience as c.ontinues to be useful and appropriate. That is'
he lvill ahvtr..1's have an oral element, but it will not be the
perimeter and boundary line of his persotrarlity and behavior;
it rvill just be one part.
Tl"ris <ilzrl eletuent has tnanv delightful arttl beneficent functions ir-r latei'lifc. It makes us love $'omen's bl'easts, kissthem'
cuddle them, suck them, play with them. It makes us love
pictures of wonten's breasts. (Hence, prudes and women's
Iibei'ationists will never get rid of such "pol'nogt'aphic" or'
"chauvinistic" alt until they first {ind some wa}'to get rid of
the neoteny-the prolortgetl infancy-of the httrlrttn species.
Even bottle-fetl infants actluire olalistl, sir-rce the bottle I'enrains stubbolnly a dead bt'east substitute but still a brcust
sultstitute.) The olal eielxent also makes it ltossible, if we are
lucky, to expelience the "oceanic consciousness" of the mvstics, for', if Fi'eud is right, this is a development of the
union-rvith-mother that the nursing child feels. It also gives us
what share we hal'e in warmth, kindness, generosity and that
verv oral virtue, fotgiveness. In short, if we have any tender-
47
ness at all, we haven't fully repressed our oral element.
It should be obvious at this point that the historical Yeshua
of Nazareth (the Jesus Christ of Christian mythology) was a
man with a considerable oral element. He had a high degree of
mystic oneness with the universe. He loved little children and
compared them to the kingdom of heaven. He sympathized with
publicans and sinners. He even forgave those who crucified
him. It is not surprising that so many artists have intuitively
portrayed him as a small infant nursing at the breast of Mary.
His is a totally oral religion. Part of the confusing and schizophrenic quality of American life is the result of an official
allegiance to this religion combined with an economic system
of cutthroat capitalism, which is based on a totally anal
rejection of all these tender oral values. Only the admixture of
anality in Christianity itself, deposited by the legalistic
woman-hater St. Paul, allows the incompatible mixture to
come off at all.
Orality becomes sick and sinister rl'hen the person is cathected or stuck at that psychological stage and cannot or will
not develop the personality traits of later childhood and
maturity. The cathected oral personality carries forgiveness
much further than Jesus himself-who, after all, was capable
of shouting angry denunciations at the "generation of vipers"
around him, condemning lawyers as "hypocrites" and even
taking a whip to the usurious money changers in the temple.
In Dr. Perls's striking terminology, the mature person makes
demands on others and on the world, but the oral personality
only harbors resentrnents. Look hard and unflinchingly at
something or somebody you resent, and there you will find a
trace of pathological oralism in you. The healthy process,
confronted by frustration, is to tell the frustrator to get the
hell out of your way. The oral process is to submit, forgive the
frustrator for his primitive and insensitive nature (so much
less "spiritual" than the oralist himself) and then to harbor an
unspoken resentment.
As Dr. Perls has written:
If
you have any difficulties in communication with anyone,
look for your resentments. Resentments are among the worst
possible unfinished situations-unfinished gestalts. If you resent, you can neither let go nor have it out. Resentment rs an
48
emotion of centrai importance. The resentment is the most
important expression of an impasse-of being stuck. If you feel
resentment, be able to express your resentment. A resentment
unexpressed often is experienced as, or changes into, feelings of
guilt. Whenever you feel guilty, find out what you are resenting
and express it and nrake your demands explicit. This alone will
help a lot.a
The dependent and resentful oral personality programs his
life around a technique which actor-directol Mike Nichols once
called "winning by losing." In'any conflict, we can either win
boldly and frankly by u'inning-or we can win symbolically by
losing. That is, if we have the classic oral rationalizations, we
can convince ourselves that our loss was a spiritual or moral
victory. It showed our superiority to the crude and bullying
rascal lvhom rve graciously refused to fight directly. If you
watch people who are especially good at this technique, you
will see that thev always convey the resentment-filled rnessage that they zrre the real r.vinners, eithel by tone of voice or'
by posture and "body language" or through some other subtle
form of nonverbal communication.
An old cartoon shows a top sergeant shouting at a recruit:
"And wipe that opinion off your face!" The rookie, unable to
win against the army system in any ordinary way, was evidently regressing to his oral component and trying to signal
that he was still winning-by losing.
The cathected oral personality attempts to turn all human
relations into a series of encounters with an enormous,
rounded, firmly nippled, all-providing pair of breasts. If you
can't orl,von't play that role, he then turns you into an avatar
of the "denying mother" or "bad mother" (Freud's terms), who
selfishly and malignantly withholds the treasured nipples. Of
course, if you like being a pair of nipples, there is a fortune to
be made-just acquire a psychiatrist's license and go into
business. These types rvill be glad to pay your fees, whatever
they are, not only for years, but even for decades. There is only
one rule: Never try to be a true psychiatrist-never try to cure
thenr-or they will become disillusioned and seek another
therapist, another symbolic u'et nurse.
"I can't bear listening to all this misery day after day," one
psychiatrist complains to another, in an old joke. "So, who
listens?" says the second.
The fact is that the majority of people in psychotherapy at a
aFlederick f'ells, Geslall Therapll \'arbatint (Nerv York: Bantatrr IJooks, 1971).
,19
50
given moment are likely to be pure oral types or to have a large
oral element mixed with othei' traits. This is because the
oralist enters every situation seeking help from somebody
else, and the psychiatrist seems to offer the kind of help that is
most needed-mothering. On the othel hand, the opposite
extreme, the totally anal personality, is hardly ever found in
psychotherapy. This is because he is seldottt rniserable himselJ;
he just makes everybody around him miserable. For no txatter
how you try to relate to an anal type-no matter how carefully
you study his power game and tly to predict his rules-it
al.,vays turns out that -vou are at least slightly wrong and need
some measure of correction from his inexhaustible fount of
moral superiority.
(The superficially "rational" and lvell-adjusted anal types
become business executives or judges, as we have said. They
also infest mathematics, banking, accounting, professorships
in the "hard" or' "exact" sciences, atomic research and the
militaly. The often-repeated Freudian comment that ours is
an anal culture merely rreans that it has many power and
prestige positions which are attractive to anal types, who
thereupon muscle into those positions and then have the
socially defined authority to inflict their own anal values on
evervbody else. These characteristic anal values-as contrasted to the childish dependency, emotional rvarmth, kindness,
generosity, f orgiveness, buried resentn.rent and pervasive
"Uncle Tom" masochism or "Goocl Soldier Schweik" incompetence of the olal type-are eliciency, precision, hatred of
the body and of all mess or dirt, fear of emotional contact,
steln realism and n-roralistic desire to meddle in evelybody
else's life. The rnore hysterical and less rational anal types
tend to become policemen or collectors of bad debts for cledit
corporations.)
The shock and dismay of the infant when the harshness of
traditional toilet training introduces the anal-rational-molal
values into the previously cozy oral-oceanic state is conveyed
with remarkable ovelt symbolism in Char'les Dlckens's Dru;id
CopperJieLd. So Freudian is this sequence, indeed, that it is
hard to believe that it was actually written half a century
before Freud defined the oral and anal stages in his Three
Contributions to the Theory o.l'Ser.
Dickens describes an idyllic childhood in rvhich David lives
with a widowed mother who can safelv be categorized as a
secular version of the bonadea (good goddess). Onto this happy
scene intludes the horrible Mi'. Murdstone, whose "Jehovah
complex" (as any modern psychiatrist would call it) makes him
ern avatar of the archetypal punishing father god. There is no
rvay of obe-ving all of Muldstone's mles; thele are too lnany of
them ancl most of them are unstated and irnplicit anyway.
David undergoes sonle monumental lashings on the buttocks
(for his own good, of course, although Dickens emphasizes in a
quite Freudian way the obvious enjoyment Mr. Muldstone
obtains from these sessions). Quite natr"rrally, Davicl begins to
internalize this anal system of values (especially after Murdstone becomes his stepfather) and imagines that he is quite a
guilty little wretch ancl richly derserves this torture. Then-in
a quite eerie echo of Phlyne or of Eleanor of Aquitaine baring
her breasts in Jerusalem at the height of the medieval patriarchal i,rge-Dickens has the following scene, when David
returns from a year at school:
I rvent in rvith quiet, timid step.
God knows hou'
infantine the lrlelnory uay have
beer.r
that was
in me at the sound of mv mother's voice in the old
parlour when I set foot in the hall. I think I nust have laid in
hel arms and heald her singing to me u'hen I lvas but a baby.
awakened
The sttain was ne\\r to me but it rv:rs so old that it filled utv heart
brirrful like a fi'iend cotne bzrck flom :r long abserrse.
I believed flom the solitar'5, and thoughtful r,vay in rvhich mv
mother murmered her song that she rvas aione, and I rvent
softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an
infant rvhose tinv htrnd she held against her neck. Hei'eyes
n'ere lookir.rg clou'n upon its f:rce and she strt singing to it. I rvas
so fal right that she had no other compatrion. I spolie to her and
she st:rrted and clied out. But seeing me she called me her dear
Davy, her own bov! and coming half wa1, across the room to
nreet nie, kneeler.l dorvn upon the gtound and kissed me, and laid
mv head down on hel bosom neal the little creature that was
nestling thele, :u.rd put its h:rnd up to niy lips.
I wish I had died. I rvish I had died theu, with that feeling in
my heart. I shoul<i have been more fit for heaven than I have
ever been since.
It is normal at present to squirm rvith elnbarrassment at
Dickens's sentimentality, just as it was normal to squirm with
embarrassment (or prurience) at what was an equally eloquent sex scene back in the days when hr, was writing. And
-vet-if one can put aside one's resentment at the very obvious
ways he is playing on the leader''s heartstrings-the only
51
intelligent response to this is frank admiration for the man's
insight. The retut'n to the mother's breast to escape the harsh
"morality" of the punishing father or father god is a tendency
so strong that it has been recognized not onl-v by Freud but by
the overwhelming majority of Freud's revisionists. Uuless lve
understand th:rt pzrrt of us is still seeking this whenever we
caress a woman's so-called secondar"v sex zones in the breasts,
we will be making love in a psychological darkness as neurotic
as the physical dat'kness rvhich our grandparents imposed on
their bedrooms.
Of course, Murdstone is soon back on the scene again and
David undergoes fnrther tniseries. A Catholic bishop once
complained that Jzrue Russell's breasts l-rung "like a storm
cloud" ovel' every scene in Tht' Outluto,' David's urother''s
breasts hang like the sun itself ovei'the growing darkness of
the Murdstone rvorld until David finallv fr"ees himself from it
by becoming Cheu'les Dickens and der.rouncing the cruelty,
hypocrisy and scarcely sublintated sadisn that made up the
;t
Victorian theory of child-rearing.
It is amusing to note (although this could hardly be conscious on Dickens's part), that the last svllable of Mr. Murdstone's name suggests the hard, rocky ir.npression that anal
types usually convey, whiie the fir'st syllable is suggestive of
the French nterde, excrement.
Dickens's ability to communicate movingly how insanely
cruel Murdstone's child-rearing methods seem to the child
himself eventually resulted in widespread repugnance for
them. The same result, however, is still achieved by more
subtle psychological conditioning in all but the most "ptogressive" families; David Copperfield's storlr-' is still moving because we have all passed through sometl-ring like it. We do not
bring the oral bliss u,'ith us, as Jesus evidentl.v did, into
adulthood; it is alrvays disrupted b1' zrn anal-moralistic peliod.
This is why the oral types we encountet' are not carrying theil'
infantile traits as graciously and benevolently as Jesus and do
not seem like second Christs but like cat'icntured Christ.s. The-v
are carrying their orality resentfully, spitefully and neurotically, not integrating it into an adult realism, but using it to
stave off maturity. This is the stubborn qr-rality of the neurotic
rvlrich Freud called Besetzung or Catlir'.r'i.s.
But, of course, all olal traits in adulthood are not necessarily
has
neurotic. It has been said that tl-re happiest man is he
"vho
forgiven most (and only those who have truly lealned how to
forgive can understand that statement); but there would be no
forgiveness without some oral reurnant in the personality. The
totally anal person never forgives anything-which may explain why the conservatives, who are alw:rys anal, have
choosen the elephant, symbol of long memol.v, as their symbol.
Orality also adds a great deal to sex. (It is perhaps an
indication of the stlength of my orvn oral component that I
cannot imtrgine a totally anal person, who never per.forms
orally, being a satisfactory sexual partner.)5 As Freud pointed
out, oraiity has not only extended downwar.d flonr the br.easts
but uprn'ard as well, and the mouth-to-mouth kiss-',r'hich is
what we usually mean when we just say "the kiss"-is its rnost
astonishing rnanifestation. In fzr.ct, behind Freud's ponder.ous
Germanic-scientific style in Three Contt.ibutiotts to the Thectt'y
o.f Ser, he sounds rather amused at the fact that moutl-r-mouth
contact was rrof considered a perversion while, in his tirne,
mor.rth-genital contact emphatically was. After all, if u'e try to
argue that geniterl-genital coupling is ot'daineti by God as ther
onc pennissible cliversion for earth people, then mouth-genital
pleasures are only on.e step away from the "norm" lvhile
mouth-mouth kissing is tz'o steps away and thus doubly
perverted. As for nibbling the earlobes. . . !
Freud also points out that there is something irrational in
the commonplace reaction that causes a man to feel r.evulsion
if he accidentally uses a wontan'.s toothbrush althor-rgh he may
have been kissing her rapturously just a short while earlier..6
It was Kinsey, two generations later, lvho pointed out ther
sin,ilar irutrtionality of those rvho exper.ience revulsion at the
thought of cunnilingus or fellatio because "germs might be
transrnitted." Gelms, the no-nonsense Indiana zoologist commented sternly, are much mor.e likelv to be tlansmitted by
mouth-to-rnout h kissin{r.
In fact, as Ft'eud \vas awat'e, all alleged "l-easons" for.r,e.jectiI actu:rlly sccrled highcr on analily in a stand:rlcl psychological test-but not
rrr irc,ir
high er.
('In anothel place he mentions that the normal or avelage levulsion
against the risc of the
anus in scxu:rl intet'coulse because it is "cont:rnrinat.ed" bv the passzrge ol feces is exactll,'
similar to the claim of some hr,,stclical female patients that they can't accept the pcnis
beczruse it is used ft>r the passage of uline. The implication was too tlat ipg even for.him.
and he quickly adcls that he is not "espousing the t'ause" of the homosexuals.
ing orality are rationalizations. One is afraid or repulsed by
the thought of such acts because one has been trained to be
afraid or repulsed, and all the "reasons" are invented later.
(Flaubert once commented on middle-class young men who
avoid prostitutes because of fear of venereal disease "and
then catch the most beautiful cases of clap from their sweethearts.") In fact, revulsion against anl' pleasurable act is a
mark of terrors left in the psyche b-v some anal figure in early
life-a parent, uncle, aunt, older brother, teacher, etc. There is
a hilarious essay-or a whole book-on the reasons people give
for not trying marijuana or fol staying in iobs ormarriages that
they hate, or for obeying obviouslv itiiotic ancl unenforceable
laws, etc. In most cases, except u'here real harm to innocent
individuals is probable, our feals are entirelv phobic and
absurd. Just as an old college song reduces all the problems of
ontology to Zenlike empiricisli-tWe're here because lve're heLe,
because'uve're here, because u'e'le here
-it
.
is equally true, almost always, to say that
We're scared because lve're scared,
because r've're scared. because we'te scared
o4
.
Fortunately, the fears that infest below-the-belt orality
have not seliousl.v infected the breast quest itself. I did i'ead
once, hou'ever, in some Dear Crabbv-or Ann Launders-type
column, about a \\'oman who lvas afraid of allou'ing her
husband too much gratilication of that sort for feal it might
give her breast cancer. In such a case, one hardly needs Freud
to see that the ostensible "reason" for the fear was created
after the fear itself. The really significant form of repression
of orality in our culture is the phobia against breast-feeding
infants, which began in the 1920s, peaked in the 1950s and has
been declining (very slowly) ever since. But this subject, which
may relate to the paranoid trend of our society generally, will
be treated in the chapter "The Breast Repressed."
Freudianism itself reached son,e kind of climax ol peak
during those same years with the remarkable career of
Edr-r,und Bergler, M.D. Dr. Bergler became convincecl that not
some but all human neuroses were caused by desire for the
breast-but in a very peculial sense. The oneness of the
infant at the nipple, he said, was literall;q believed by the
infant, and the fundamental trauma of life was the shocked
discovery that this wonderful object belonged to somebody
else-to mother. Worse yet, she could withhold it on occasion.
From this, Dr. Bergler claimed, there came a desire for
revenge which was the secret core of every subsequent action.
This, of course, is no odder sounding than most Freudian
theories, but Dr. Bergler rvas just beginning. His theories
became increasingly imaginative and all-inclusive. In Motrc'y
and the Unconscio'us, he proved that every patient who ever
had trouble meeting his high fees was actually withholding
the money to punish him for being right. In Fctshiort. cntd th,e
(Jtt.cortscious, he proved-and this has ahvays been tny favorite-that women's clothes are all hideously ugly because they
are designed by homosexuals seeking revenge against their
mothers for withholding the breast and are accepted by
women because they, poor dears, are all masochists secretly
devoted to punishing themselves. In lr{eurotic Counter.feit Sex,
he proved that everything Kinsey found statistically normal is
actually neurotic and that only the "missionary position" (as
the Hawaiians call man-on-top coitus) is normal. In Writers
and the (Jnconsciotts, he proved that everybody who has ever
written a book was a repressed homosexual, chewing and
sucking on words as "regular" homosexuals chew and suck on
penises, as substitutes for the denied breast. In between these
remarkable tomes, he wrote endless articles proving that all
clitics of his theories-who by then were legion in psychoanalytical and psychiatric circles-were neurotic. He eventually became the favorite hate-object of the Gay Liberation
Front and it is as such that he is remembered, which is really a
pity because sone of his notions rvere probably at least
partialiy true.
Finally, Ira Wallach, in a book that appeared to be satire,
HopaLong Freu.cL Ricles Again, suggested that just as evef-v
woman wishes to have a penis (according to the master'), every
man wishes to have a pair of breasts. Was this really parody?
Carl Jung, the most prestigious of F reud's rivals, argues
soberly that each sex unconsciously wishes to become more
like the other and that this desire finds increasing expression
with age-as proofs of which he offered the mustaches on old
women and the pendulous breasts on old men. Again, are we
sure he is completely wrong? The universal human experience
of prolonged infancy has conditioned and imprinted us in so
OD
many ways that any speculation about the breast is, at very
least, a fantasy that has occurred to more than one mind in
history and is thus part of our human heritage.
There is, for instance, the puzzling phenomenon of oral
sadism. On a simple reading of Freud's original theories, this
should not exist at all, since only the calamities of toilet
training produce the reactive sadism of the anal types.
(Petard, the old word for bomb, comes from the same root as
fart, and the military mentality can be defined as the search
for a satisfactorily orgasrnic superexplosion which leaves
everybody dead, like the epic farts in certain jokes.) According
to Freud, who may be a bit imaginative here, oral sadism, on
the other hand, derives flom the inf ant's cannibalistic f antasies
while at the breast. (We adults still say, "I could eat I'ou all up"
when transported by erotic bliss.) This theme is characteristic
of the werewolf and vampire legends which have been around
at least since the New Stone Age and received a new currency
when Hollywood discovered their commercial appeal in the
1930s.
One could hazard a guess that there is not a child in
America-or in any country where Hollywood films circulate-who is not familiar with the whole grisly lore of how a
56
man bitten by the werewolf becomes a werewolf, how these
creatures are seized at the full moon (sign of the mother
goddess) with the lust for human flesh, and how that other
jolly fellow, the vampire, rises from the grave to suck blood
from the living. Ernest Jones wrote the first psychoanalytic
study of this legendry back in 1910, even before Hollywood
discovered it, and pointed out the ambivalence and strange
sympathy these monsters evoke-a compassionate identification rationalized by the thought, "They can't help what
they've become," a notion seldom rememberdd about our
human enemies in wartime (or any other time for that matte